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Endpoint: And Other Poems, by John Updike, Knopf, 97 pages, $29.95

The moment John Updike's ubiquity began to sink in, idolizers (and enviers) started to anticipate his death – the only force certain to stop him. One of the best examples of this is U & I (1999), Nicholson Baker's account of his obsession with the workaholic man of letters, which used a carpe diem alibi (“How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive!”) to sublimate his scandalized awe at Updike's output.

A freak – as much as force – of nature, Updike was the American anti-Beckett: writerly difficulty and doubt wiped away in graphomaniacal deluge. Martin Amis called him the “psychotic Santa of volubility.” James Wood said he wrote “as if language were just a meaningless bill to a very rich man.” His uncontrollable productivity meant we were never kept waiting for Godot.

Endpoint: And Other Poems , assembled over the past half-dozen years of his life, confirms that Updike's productivity won't be interrupted by his passing. Without a doubt, a lot more is coming: stories, novels, essays, introductions, reviews. All uncollected and cooling its heels.

Launching Updike's posthumous career with a poetry collection is fitting, given that his literary debut in 1958 was as a poet ( The Carpentered Hen: And Other Tame Creatures ). He went on to publish seven more collections of poetry, even while the amplitude and attentiveness of his fiction gave those collections – musical and buoyant, though far less ravishing than his novels – the look of light verse.

Or worse, warm-up drills, finger exercises; the sort of thing you do because, writing-momentum running high, you can.

Such gripes were at times unfair, but never entirely unwarranted. And indeed, Endpoint shares with its predecessors a sense of overextended expertise, with melodious poems sealing unoriginal ideas between energy-sapping rhymes. (He describes television as “these spurts of lights are drunk in by my brain,/ which sickens quickly, till it thirsts again.”)

But Endpoint also reminds us of what Updike could achieve when his versifying was animated by more than hobbyism. And what animated him this (final) time was extinction. Old computers, old money, old tools, old crooners. Faced with the reality that “the viewer, like the view, is wearing out,” Updike's still-robust creativity composes its own valediction. Lost vigour (“flesh drags us down”) is everywhere reflected, and refracted, through images: “I see buds so subtle/ they know, though fat, this is no time to bloom.”

This idea is given its most undeceived expression in the title poem, which, by many degrees, is one of Updike's best. Loosely constructed around the occasions of his birthday – with the last entry given a few days before Christmas, 2008, when a biopsy confirmed his cancer – Updike gives us thumbnail portraits of himself as aging writer, husband, father. Down to the last line of this poem, he is in character: self-exposer, autobiographer, acutely realistic observer of contemporary American life. To be alive was to write, and we see glimpses of a life paid for by the many words he published (“A thousand dollars then meant we could eat/ for months. A poem might buy a pair of shoes”).

The poem is by turns whimsical, tender, disconsolate, with moving anecdotes underwritten by touches of self-disgust and embarrassment. Updike brutally serves up the goods on bodily deterioration, though turning grey also becomes grist for some astonishing eloquence (“the snow that aged me/ distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow”).

What really knocks you for six, however, is the way the threads of memory and association are ruefully gathered in, so that the sensual prosperity Updike drove to capacity for 50 years is now lived in reverse. “Birthday, death day – what day is not both?”

Carmine Starnino has just published his fourth book of poems, This Way Out. He lives in Montreal, where he edits Maisonneuve magazine.